Scroll any C-suite LinkedIn feed and you will see the same mantra: We put customers first.
It is easy to say, harder to prove. And in most boardrooms, the distance between brand and buyer is getting wider. How do industry leaders focus on closing the gap between business assumptions and real customer problems?
I spoke with six leaders in software, FMCG, education, creative production, automotive, and luxury wines & spirits. Their industries and pressures are different, but they share one habit: they keep the customer’s voice in the room, not as a campaign tagline but as an operating system.
Martin Dyhouse has spent more than two decades in marketing, most recently at Intuit UK. He knows how quickly perspective changes once you are on the inside. “Once you work for the brand, you are not the customer anymore,” he said. His solution is simple: get closer. At Intuit, that meant taking teams into the field, hosting events where they could speak with customers face-to-face, ask questions, and hear the unfiltered truth. It is not the fastest way to gather feedback, but Martin calls it irreplaceable. “The depth you get in person is truly magical, it delivers insights and outcomes that dashboards couldn’t.”
In Barcelona, Chiara Clemente follows the same principle through a different lens. As Head of Brand Marketing and Communications at EPICODE Institute of Technology, and after years scaling Semrush Italia, her first step is to check search behaviour. But she will not fill an editorial calendar for the sake of it. “Do people actually need to see this? Or am I just filling a spot?” she asks. When the answer is yes, her team acts like a media house, producing content that entertains, solves problems, and earns attention. The feedback from comments and interactions becomes its own stream of consumer insight.
When the insight gap is yours to fill
Maria Florencia Lioni Tarsitano knows what happens when that stream runs dry. As Global Head of Brand Partnerships and Marketing at creative design studio Váscolo she often sits between brands and the creative agencies they hire. Too often, the briefs arrive without a clear audience or message. Even large brands, she explained, sometimes skip the research you would expect. And when deadlines are tight, insight is the first thing to disappear. Flor has learned to run her own quick studies before production begins. “Every single project is due yesterday,” she said, “but if you do not do the insight work up front, performance will pay the price.”
That focus on owning the insight process is shared by Benet Pujol who leads market research at SEAT S.A. and CUPRA. His team runs more than a hundred studies a year, blending internal projects with deeper agency work. AI and modern platforms have made it easier to move quickly and reduce bias, but some audiences still require specialist reach. “We are in a historic moment,” he told me. “Everyone can become a researcher with AI on their side, but agencies will still be needed for the hard-to-find voices.”
Designing the right moment for the right audience
In London, Karol Drozdzik manages Moët & Chandon for LVMH. His challenge is that both audience and occasion change the message entirely. Selling premium beverages means creating experiences that feel as elevated as the product itself. One example is the champagne bar at Harrods during Christmas – a space curated for customers who are ready to indulge. It is as much a listening post as a sales channel, revealing what really drives choice in the moment. “When you are selling something exceptional,” Karol said, “the experience has to exceed expectations.”
Ahmed Wahdan builds from a simple rule that sounds unfashionable in 2025 and yet proves decisive: do the fundamentals well. Now a brand marketer on Kellogg’s cereals in the Middle East at Kellanova, he treats research as the start line, not a stage gate. When sales data showed a category decline across brands, his team went back to basics. Qualitative work made the real issue unmistakable. The problem wasn’t that people had stopped eating cereal at breakfast and moved to other occasions. They still used cereal in multiple ways. The decline was about relevance. Consumers have become more discerning about natural versus processed foods, and many no longer saw traditional cereals as fitting their definition of healthy. That reframed the briefs. Strategy shifted toward regaining relevance through healthy innovation and clearer communication of the category’s benefits.
Execution followed. Communication expanded from “morning for children” to “for everyone, across occasions,” while leading with health cues. A TikTok collaboration around Cocoa Pops unlocked user-generated recipe ideas and a measurable sales lift, and in parallel the pipeline moved toward products with lower sugar, added protein, and simpler nutrition stories that are easier to understand at a glance.
Under the hood, the process is disciplined. The brand team partners with an insights arm that triangulates market data and consumer learning. Qual is used to get to the why. Quant validates at scale. The team tracks occasions, purchasing power, place, and timing, and it also measures shifts in perceived naturalness, processing concerns, and health credibility so product, price, and presence show up where it matters. As he puts it, the work is simple in theory. The hard part is doing the basics with rigor, every time.
Technology can make this kind of proximity faster. At Chatty Insights, we use voice-based, AI-moderated interviews to bring authentic consumer language into the room in days rather than weeks. But as these leaders show, tools are only as effective as the system behind them.
Leave a Reply